Revisiting My Relationships with Surfing, Depression, and the Need for an Identity

Since those early years, my whole life has subconsciously been shaped around surfing.

I’m 33-years old now — 18 years after my surfing life began — and I have lived in Orange County, California for a decade.

And what we really mean when we ask this is “What’s your social status? ” or “How much money do you make? ” I would love this question to be replaced by “What do you do for fun? ” or “What do you do to make you feel like a kid again? ” I would much rather talk about surfing or music or art with strangers than explain that I scrape the edges off of sharp metal plates that then get attached on to the sides of tanks.

Then it becomes the lifestyle that in turn fuels your passion for the environment, for travel, for other people, the natural world, and a love of life.

I have been told I can’t do things my whole life, often by people who care most about me. “You can’t move to America.

That hard lesson meant the loss of that home and career, a divorce, an awful depression, tension with my family, another terrible relationship, and the task of realizing all my choices in life had led me to that point.

One by one our friends stopped surfing, letting life and responsibility take over.

Instead of trying to fix myself and get back to normal. “Perhaps our depression is not a sickness but a call to break out, to let go, to lose the old structures and stories we have been holding up about ourselves and the world and rest deeply in the truth of who we really are…What if you need to shed your half-shed skin, not climb back into it?

Later in my surfing life, I would come to learn that surfing is actually quite an isolated activity.